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"Small is beautiful":an investigation of literacy practices of MA thesis writing in two different national locations in Europe
Carole Sedgwick CALPIU conference 2012
Bologna Accord Bologna Accord (June 1999)(June 1999)
• Common system of ‘easily readable and comparable degrees’
• 2 main cycles: undergraduate and graduate
• common system of credits
• European co-operation in quality assurance
MA English studies MA English studies thesisthesis
• Hungary
• Italy
New Literacy StudiesNew Literacy Studies
Literacy practices:
‘… not just what people do with literacy, but what they make of what they do, the values they place on it and the ideologies that surround it.’ (Baynham, 1995: 1)
Research questionsResearch questions
1. What are the literacy practices of writing an MA thesis on the two English studies programmes?
2. What similarities and differences in practices can be identified across the two programmes?
Research questionsResearch questions
3. How do these practices relate to the social contexts of the programmes?
4. How do academic literacy practices on these two programmes relate to notions of ‘readable and comparable’ degrees?
Qualitative inquiry: Qualitative inquiry: ethnographic ethnographic perpectiveperpective
• ‘Real world’ settings• Purposive sampling: ‘rich’ data, multiple
sources, multiple perspectives• Participant rather than researcher directed
Data collectionData collection
Interviews: students, supervisors and assessors Documentation: graded theses + drafts, written feedback, course descriptions, criteria for assessment
Observation: field notes
English literatureEnglish literatureEva’s thesis
Self-Identity and Memory in Wordsworth’s Poetry: The lifelong revision of The Prelude
Elek’s thesis
Metafiction in Paul Auster’s New York Trilogy
Adriana’s thesis
Mildmay Fane’s Masque Raguaillo D’Oceano (1640): A study
Variation in practicesVariation in practices
• Theoretical
• Topic-based
• Ideological
Social ContextsSocial Contexts
• Local: relationships, courses, research, institutional regulations
• Global: real and imagined, known, partially-known, ‘international’/Anglophone publication
• National: identities, political, economic, social histories
‘Readable’ and ‘comparable’ degreesTop-down approaches: European
qualifications framework
•Cumulative
•Empirical research
•Transferable skills and competences
•Communicated transparently
Lack of co-operation Lack of co-operation with the reformswith the reforms
• Adopting the system, not changing the culture, Westernization of systems externally imposed by administrators (Kovtun and Stick (2009), Tomusk (2008), Wex (2007)
• Conflict between national interpretations and Bologna Requirements (Westerjden, 2003) and second ENQA survey (2008)
‘‘ReadableReadable’’ and and ‘‘comparablecomparable’’ degrees degrees
Bottom-up approaches
• Transnational collaboration: joint degrees, projects, exchanges
• Local research repositories
ConclusionConclusion• To focus on the text alone:
‘is like coming upon the scene of a party after it is over and everyone has gone home, being left to imagine from the remnants what the party must have been like’(Brandt 1990, cited in Prior, 1998:28)
